A cyclist rides past finished panels on San Bruno Ave. and Rickard St. March 7, 2014 underneath US 101 South in San Francisco, Calif. The mural project creating large panels from the Board Game Porto-Loteria created by Kate Connell and Oscar Melara under the Alemany Island Beautifiction Project was started in 2011 by the Portola Neighborhood. In October 2013, 30 panels were hung and the last 18 were hung on March 2, 2014. less

A cyclist rides past finished panels on San Bruno Ave. and Rickard St. March 7, 2014 underneath US 101 South in San Francisco, Calif. The mural project creating large panels from the Board Game Porto-Loteria ... more

Take 101 southbound in San Francisco to Silver Avenue, then double back under the freeway, and you'll see the most imaginative use of a Caltrans fence imaginable.

Running along San Bruno Avenue, the fence is Cyclone on one side and iron spike on the other, and on both sides are 48 brilliantly colored plywood panels that tell the story of the adjacent Portola district.

Called the Alemany Island Project and completed in early March, it forms an art alley on San Bruno as it dips down under the 280/101 interchange at Alemany Boulevard. The famed Alemany Farmers' Market, the street fair, the blue water tower, the dairy, the windmill, the greenhouses, plus all the neighborhood characters - each get their own painting, with air between them so that Caltrans officials and police can still see through the fence.

"We're just a scrappy, edge-of-the-city working-class neighborhood that nobody knows about," says Kate Connell, who counts among the contributing artists "44 households, three classrooms and one fire station. We've all worked hard to develop a cultural life out here. "

Included in that count is the household of Connell, a City College librarian, and her partner, Oscar Melara, a retired SamTrans driver. They created a neighborhood-centric board game called Porto-Loteria, upon which all 48 paintings are based.

To bring the images off the playing cards and onto the fence, Melara enlarged each image. These were distributed, along with an outline on a wood panel, a box of paints and some brushes, to anyone who signed up to become an artist. They also got a day of group training under Keith Ferris, a fine-arts painter in the neighborhood.

The drill was to follow the line drawing issued by Melara, but some preferred to work outside the lines. "In many cases the changes they made looked better than the original," Connell says. "That's the beauty of everyone working together."

Some did not know they were artists until they picked up the brush. This would include the firefighters of Station 42, who contributed a painting of their own station house.

"One woman was volunteered by her husband," says Melara, stopping at a panel called "The Street Fair," by Rita Hontalas. "Now she wants to take painting classes."

The Alemany Island Project, coordinated by the Portola Neighborhood Association and financed through a Community Challenge Grant, is a three-part installation. The first came two years ago when a teenage painter named Cory Ferris inked a design for the support pillar. Once the pillar was painted to depict flora and fauna native to the Portola, a horticulture class at City College was enlisted to design and plant a native garden in the island around the pillar, as part two. Part three is the fence.

A stone marker the size of a monument reads, "Welcome to Portola," but the traffic island where it sits is anything but welcoming.

From a car, you can see it in passing - but only if you are passing quickly. There is no place to pull over, and cars come flying down the hill on San Bruno, gaining momentum as the try to time the light and shoot up onto the freeway.

For an outsider, the best perspective on the whole installation is to turn at Rickard Street, park across from the Caltrans yard and walk it, down one side of San Bruno and back up the other. Bring earplugs. "Listen to the music in your head," Connell recommends. It will take a while to decompress, but the art will overcome the harsh environment.

"I love the name Alemany Island," Connell says. "It's such a romantic name for this concrete washing machine of an intersection on the old Islais Creek marsh."

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